Nils Gunnar Hansson von Heijne (Gothenburg, Sweden, 1951) is the director of the National Laboratory of Science of Life Cryo-EM Facility of Stockholm and a visiting professor of the Rockefeller University of New York. He has been educated in the KTH Royal Institute of Technology of Stockholm, where he obtained his master’s degree in Chemistry and his PhD in Physics, Dr. Von Heijne did a research internship in the University of Michigan and was a visiting professor in the Molecular Biology Institute of the University of California – Los Angeles (UCLA) and in the Protein Engineering Research Institute of Japan.

He was a professor in the KTH Royal Institute of Technology of Sweden, in the Stockholm University and also the group leader of the Karolinska Institute Center for Structural Biochemistry (NOVUM). He has also been director in the Stockholm Bioinformatics Center and in the Center for Biomembrane Research.

His research has been focused in the classification of proteins and biogenesis and in the structure of the membrane proteins His most important scientific accomplishments are the discovery and experimental validation of the named ‘(-1, -3) –rule’, which describes the places of division of the peptides and the named rule of ‘inner positive’.

He has been a member of different scientific and editorial committees, and also the consultant of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry and for Psychology or Medicine. He is the author of more than 360 scientific publications with a high influence.

Von Heijne is also a member of the European Academy, of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.  Doctor ‘honoris causa’ by the Abo Akademi, and has received several recognitions and prizes, among which we can find the Arrhenius Medal of the Swedish Society of Chemistry.